Custom Routing Solutions with PostGIS with Dennis Boachie Boateng

In this talk, I share my experience using PostGIS to build a custom routing solution for the "Find My Classroom" application, a project that required flexibility and fine-tuned control over spatial data. While tools like pgRouting provide out-of-the-box functionality, I discovered that using PostGIS to manage my own graph data structure allowed for greater flexibility and adaptability. I will walk through how PostGIS efficiently handled the spatial aspects of the application, from storing and querying geographic data and a spatial graph of over half a million nodes and edges to finding the nearest nodes to user inputs using spatial indexes. This includes implementing a custom routing algorithm like Dijkstra's or A*, while leveraging GiST indexing and understanding the role of underlying data structures like R-trees for fast spatial queries.